Ahhhhh Cy. It is possible to be loved too much… Artist Rindy Sam loves Twombly’s work so much that she kissed a $2.8-million all-white canvas, Phaedrus, at a 2007 show at the Collection Lambert museum. ‘I kissed it without thinking’, she said. ‘It was an artistic act of love.’ The prosecution called the red-lipstick smudge she left behind ‘a sort of cannibalism, or parasitism’ (she ended up paying €500 to owner Yvon Lambert and €1,000 to the Lambert Collection).

Last December, when Larry Gagosian opened a new branch of his gallery empire in Rome with a show of Twombly’s works, rumour had it that his motivation was to secure the Rome resident’s estate. Such is the eighty-year-old’s status, he already has his own gallery in the Menil collection in Houston. Meanwhile, over in London this June, Twombly’s show at Tate Modern opened to widespread critical acclaim and introduced a new audience to one of America’s great artists, of whom Roland Barthes once wrote, ‘There is quite often in a single painter a whole history of painting.’